Top Sudanese officials have been intimately involved in the planning, execution, and cover-up of atrocities committed against the civilian population of the country's Darfur region, according to a report to be delivered to the UN Security Council Thursday by International Criminal Court (ICC) Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo . The report accuses the Government of Sudan [...]

A Camp Pendleton military judge Tuesday dismissed one count of obstruction of justice against US Marine Corps 1st Lt. Andrew Grayson , an intelligence officer charged in connection with the November 2005 killings of 24 Iraqi civilians in Haditha . The obstruction charge was based on allegations that Grayson ordered a subordinate to delete photographic [...]

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif Tuesday called for Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to resign and be tried for treason, labeling Musharraf a traitor disloyal to Pakistan. Now head of the PML-N party in the country's ruling coalition government, Sharif said that Musharraf should be punished for the "damage" that he has done to Pakistan [...]

A proposed UK anti-terror bill that would allow authorities to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 42 days has been amended to only apply in cases of "grave and exceptional" terrorist threats, UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said Tuesday. Current British law authorizes detention without charge for 28 days , but bill proponents [...]

The recent dismissal of the US military judge presiding over the military commission trial of Canadian Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr was not politically motivated, chief Guantanamo judge Marine Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann said Monday. Kohlman said that Col. Peter Brownback was removed because the Army did not renew his recall orders . Khadr's defense lawyers [...]

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon released a statement Tuesday asserting that Israeli plans to expand settlements in the West Bank violate international law. The statement was delivered by Deputy Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Max Gaylard at the opening of the UN International Meeting on the Question of Palestine in Malta. In his [...]

The Commission on the Legal Empowerment of the Poor released a report Tuesday emphasizing the essential nature of the rule of law in eliminating poverty. The report's findings indicated that a vast majority of the world's poor live outside the protections of the law. Many are not registered with any state legal entity, making their [...]

Last month's constitutional referendum in Myanmar approving a new national charter put forward by the military has effectively "washed away" any mandate to govern claimed by opposition party National League for Democracy (NLD), state-run newspaper New Light of Myanmar said Tuesday. The NLD, led by Aung San Suu Kyi , won the 1990 general elections [...]

Human Rights Watch (HRW) Tuesday called on China to release the remaining imprisoned Tiananmen Square protesters as part of a wider effort to improve the nation's human rights image before the 2008 Olympic Games. HRW urged the government to reverse its official 1989 classification of the protests as a "counterrevolutionary rebellion", release a complete list [...]

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal Monday heard an Islamic advocacy group's allegations that a 2006 article published in Canadian news magazine Maclean's discriminated against Muslims. Mohamed Elmasry and Naiyer Habib, members of the Canadian Islamic Conference (CIC) , allege that the article, written by Canadian author Mark Steyn and entitled "The future belongs to [...]